- satisfies needs and desires,
- humanizes us,
- breathes life into macro and micro social processes-
- a) building and sustaining the social infrastructure, structure, and superstructure of society,
- b) catalyzing externalization, objectification, and internalization,
- Spreading the "sociosphere" in space, around the planet, creating order and continuity as well as novelty and conflict,
- extends the "sociosphere" in time, shaping a human world-history, and
- creates unintended consequences in our biophysical environment.
Laboring is the activity that reproduces society and history. Laboring might be defined as the totality of collective human effort, both physical and intellectual, that is expended on the shaping and reshaping of socio-culture over time and across space.
Social amnesia: reification and alienation, legitimation, and ideology
In the last section we discussed role-making and role-taking as the basis of cooperative labor. Following Berger, I argued that role-making arises out of discussion, while role-taking occurs once the initial roles have been mastered: they are acted on subconsciously, becoming habits. The blessing and the curse of role-creating occur when the original roles that were improvised by adults of a given hunting-and-gathering society are transmitted to the next generation-i.e., institutionalized.
The blessing is that the next generation is spared the task of having to invent roles for the first time and work out the bugs. The curse is that since the members of the new generation did not themselves construct these roles; they lack the same active, exploratory relationship to them. The daughters and sons inherit the roles their parents constructed. But since they didn't participate in shaping those roles, their relationship to these roles is more passive. Over generations, it becomes more difficult to imagine that these roles are malleable. They seem harder to change, or even to imagine as being different than they are. The internalized cue of the next generation might no longer be "there we go again," but "this is how things are done."
Rigidification of roles
Our roles humanize us, and at the same time they have the potential to make our minds and bodies passive. We become automatic humans-humanoids. As long as the individual is actively constructing her or his roles, the act of playing out those roles seems tenuous and changeable, almost playful. But once the roles are passed on to the next generation, they become institutionalized and ossified in the body and mind of the individual as well as in society.
The old role-making habits become simple role-taking habits. Roles become crystallized at the macrolevel in historical institutions and are experienced as being beyond the control of the individuals who currently embody them. Institutions appear to have a life of their own and confront the individual as external and coercive things about which nothing can be done. Still, no matter how difficult it may be to imagine, we have far more freedom to shape and change these roles collectively than we usually think, granting that some social circumstances are more difficult to change than others.
Reification
The process of conceptualizing a social institution as a "thing" divorced from cooperative labor is called reification. The transformation of role-playing from an experience of "here we go again" to one of "this is how things are done" as an example of reification. Suppose I am at work and someone new on the job challenges the role I am playing in order to get a particular project done. If I rigidly say, "this is how things are done," without considering that this particular situation might be unique, I am reifying the social situation. First, I am renouncing my capacity to change the role I am in. Second, I am giving up or projecting my own power to change roles by allowing myself to be enslaved to customs developed by previous workers. Third, these customs appear to me to be out of our control and have a life of their own. "Who am I to change these customs? This is the way things have always been done." Finally, the customs are not conceived of as having both good and bad qualities that are evolving. Rather, they are understood as static-as all good; or, if we happen to be rebelling against them, as all bad.
Let me define reification more robustly. Reification is a psychological process by which individuals turn social processes and products into things. Social processes and products include roles, language, and institutions. Reification is a kind of amnesia in which humans forget that we are the agents and ends of all social activities. Roles, language, and institutions are means to our ends, not ends in themselves. Reification turns means into ends. From the example above, in its full-blown form, reification can be broken down into four moments:
- a renunciation of ourselves as the agents or subjects of our creations,
- a projection of our power out of ourselves onto our creations,
- a rigidification of our creations into a status which appears beyond our control, and
- a characterization of our creations as having either all good or all bad qualities.
While reification is a collective illusion, in another sense it is real. On one hand, it presents social reality in a false form. In fact, human collective creativity (labor) stands behind all social processes and products. Reifications are illusions about how society is actually built and sustained over time. But on the other hand, when people act as if society were actually a thing standing above individuals, it gives society a certain kind of reality because people's actions support that illusion. In other words, when people are mobilized around what we may think is an illusion, the illusion becomes real in the sense that we have to deal with all of the problems that real people add to a situation through actions based on their beliefs.
But is the tendency to reify society the only problem which stands in the way of people becoming more active as social shapers? If people didn't have all of these collective psychological illusions, would we be free to create any type of society and history we wished?
The difficulty with this formulation is that it makes the problem of why societies tend to resist change only a question of social-psychological forgetfulness, or some sort of collective memory problem. This ignores the economic and political constraints that are real obstacles in changing society.
Alienation
Another reason, as Marx and Engels pointed out over 170 years ago, is that people become "alienated"-that is, they lose control over the infrastructure, structure, and superstructure of society. With the rise of agricultural states, societies became stratified, with elites using force and coercion (the threat of force) of the state to mobilize alienated castes to labor in all three dimensions of society while extracting a huge surplus of goods and services for themselves. Because they had the backing of a military, they could force the majority to work longer and harder against their will and despite their resistance. Besides surrendering goods and services, the alienated castes paid rent and taxes on land, and had to be available to fight wars and work on state projects. Bertell Ollman defined alienation as loss of control by workers over the process or production; the products of production; the relations between people on the job and relations to themselves.
It is important to keep in mind that alienation is a political and economic process of losing control over our collective-creative species activity-labor. In contrast, reification is a psychological process which can occur in any society, including those that are egalitarian. When people are alienated, they are still shaping history, but they are sleepwalking through it.
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